14 DAY TRIAL // Being the largest search engine in the world, by a fairly large margin, means that Google has access to a huge amount of data. While this is reason for worry for some people, one of the positive side-effects is Google Trends which always makes for an interesting read.
Of course, most people don't really take the time to check out the latest search trends even if they would find them interesting.
So Google has come up with Google Beat, a weekly short video highlighting the hottest search trends for the previous week.
"Every day, there are more than a billion searches for information on Google. Have you ever wondered what those searches are about—or whether what you’re searching for also happens to be on the minds of millions of others across the country?," Emily Wood, an editor in the Google Blog team, wrote.
"We’re introducing a new way to find out—a regular video series called the Google Beat that highlights some of the hottest searches on Google in the U.S," she added.
While the weekly feature is interesting in itself, it's not exactly useful. For one, it's too short to cover too many terms or provide enough context. Second, it's once a week, meaning that any trend it presents has long passed.
"Using data from Google Trends, Google Insights for Search and some additional tools, the Google Beat will give you a snapshot of some of the topics that prompted people to turn to the web over the past week," she explained.
It's not the first time Google has provided some analysis on the search trends. The Google Year-End Zeitgeist, started in 2001, shows the interesting trends of each year.
Google also underlines some of the searches around big events like this year's World Cup, the Oscars and so on.